The present disclosure generally relates to vehicle air intake systems, and more particularly relates to an over bulkhead air intake for reduced snow ingestion.
Air intake systems provide necessary air to internal combustion engines to aid in the combustion process. Conventional intake systems either draw air from inside the engine compartment or they draw air from outside the vehicle via an exterior intake port. Systems designed where the air is drawn from the inside of the engine compartment commonly suffer a drawback of drawing in warmer and less dense air than exterior air. This reduces the efficiency of the engine compared with the use of cooler exterior air. A solution to address the shortcoming of these systems is to draw in cooler exterior air. However, systems designed where the air is drawn in via an exterior intake port commonly suffer a drawback of drawing in air that includes water or particles (e.g., snow), which can block the engine intake, inhibit air flow, and/or damage the engine.
Some vehicles incorporate design elements specifically for preventing ingestion of water or other particles into the intake port. While such design elements might work satisfactorily on one vehicle design, changes to seemingly unrelated elements may have adverse consequences on the vehicle's ingestion of water or other particles into the engine's intake port. For example, alterations to a vehicle's front-end profile might adversely affect airflow into the intake port when such airflow is guided adjacent and/or through the vehicle's front end. In particular, these alterations might result in the vehicle's intake port receiving an increased amount of snow ingestion.